Oaxaca’s Pacific Coast: Puerto Escondido, Zipolite, and Mazunte

Back to Puerto Escondido. Back to electricity, showers, flushing toilets, and contact with the outside world. It was bittersweet to be in Puerto, both good and bad to be back in the urbanized beach town. But I believe that lessons learned from living with surf bums for nine days will stick with us. Surfers tend to have a good deal of experience living on a shoestring budget and useful tips were silently passed on throughout the previous week. A bar of laundry detergent was immediately purchased to keep our handwashing skills honed.

Puerto Escondido translates to “hidden port” and it’s Bahia Principal is protected from the brunt of the mighty Pacific by it’s rocky headlands to the west. This gives the beach a calm and tranquil nature and I’m certain it was pretty damn awesome years ago. Puerto today has a very streamlined tourist feel to it with many savvy “business” men offering boat services for dolphin spotting, whale watching, and deep sea fishing. They speak…